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The driver looked into the envelope, nodded, looked up at Kondor.
“Go,” Kondor said.
He watched as the van turned back out onto the country road and disappeared over the next hill. Then he turned to the other driver and nodded. “Let’s go,” he said.
Two minutes later, they were gone, in the opposite direction, and the pull-off was dark and quiet again.
* * *
—
Professor Sabharwal was nervous. In part that was understandable. She had not had a full night’s sleep in three months. Almost all of her waking hours had been spent here, in her lab, working on the new polymer. Aside from the fact that the money from this project would fund her research for at least two years, the work itself had become all consuming. As she got closer to achieving the polymer that Hargrave had ordered, her excitement with the project had blossomed into something so exhilarating that it sustained her.
But now, with the work ended and Hargrave arriving, the accumulated strain and fatigue had hit her like a bag of bricks, and she was physically, mentally, and emotionally worn out, completely tattered. Perhaps more worrying, she was facing her great benefactor with a finished product that she feared he would find far from finished. So her hands shook, and so did her voice, as she greeted him.
“As I told you on the phone, Mr. Hargrave, I’ve made up a very large supply for you—there it is, right over there,” she said, leading him into the laboratory and waving at a row of neatly stacked five-gallon plastic buckets, all carefully sealed and labeled, “SAB-151.”
“Now I need to tell you, that is—I hope you can understand what the—I mean, um—that I have had to make one small sacrifice in order to meet your deadline? I’m sorry—I’m so sorry, I did all that I— But you see, it’s just the time element? And I was completely— In any case, I was unable to satisfactorily achieve all the desired results? Most of it, nearly all of it, yes, certainly. Everything except one small— I was forced to make a decision to give up just a little in the one small area involving the speed at which the solution dries?” she said, all in one breath as she ushered him over to the desk and chair at one end of her laboratory. “I do apologize, Mr. Hargrave, I hope it doesn’t— If only I’d had a little more time I’m sure—”
“How long will it take to dry?” Hargrave demanded.
She sucked in air through her teeth. In her anxious condition, the hissing sound startled her. “Oh!” she said. “I have not totally completed testing but—I am reasonably sure that twenty-four hours, perhaps a little longer—I believe that would suffice.”
“You believe?”
She sucked in air again and clamped down her jaw. “There is always an element of uncertainty, Mr. Hargrave,” she said, hating the way her voice shook. “There are variables—humidity and temperature in the environment, the presence or absence of sunlight—it’s impossible to say for sure, which is of course why extensive testing is—” She lurched to a halt as she saw his face.
“So it could take longer than twenty-four hours?” he said, scowling.
“Potentially, yes,” she admitted.
“Well, how the hell will I know when it is dry and ready?”
“By examining the surface elasticity,” she said. “That should allow you to ascertain the, uh . . .”
Hargrave frowned, and she stumbled to a stop, her heart hammering. And she couldn’t help thinking, What if he wants the money back?
But after what seemed an eternity to Professor Sabharwal, Hargrave shrugged. “Well, hell,” he said. “If it will do what it should in all the other parameters—”
“Oh, yes, sir, I assure you, it will, absolutely,” Professor Sabharwal interjected.
“Well then . . . all right,” he said.
“It will perform exactly as specified, I can guarantee that,” she said. And then, feeling a little ashamed of her one small failure and her neurotic performance defending it, she attempted to recoup her cool by demonstrating that she was, after all, extremely intelligent,
and she had deduced the purpose behind Hargrave’s odd commission. “So, Mr. Hargrave—where exactly is this fresco located?”
If Hargrave’s frown had caused her heart to hammer, the look he gave her now stopped it dead. “Who told you fresco?” he said, in a soft voice that was absolutely terrifying.
“It, it, I—nobody—I didn’t,” she stammered weakly.
He took a step toward her, and she wanted to run but she could not move. “I didn’t say anything about a fresco, did I?”
“I just assumed—because everything about the, the—and lime plaster, you said that—no damage to the—I mean,” she blathered.
Hargrave took another step toward her.
“It was a perfectly natural—I just figured that everything you said—and with climate change, perhaps an old church somewhere and it needed to be moved before perhaps flooding was—oh my God . . .” The words came sputtering out at a breakneck pace, but they did not slow Hargrave down, and suddenly he was right in front of her, so close she could feel his breath on her face.
